Siolon

Barriers to SharePoint Adoption

In my short time as a Share­Point con­sul­tant I’ve come across three major bar­ri­ers to imple­ment­ing the solu­tion. Mind you, this isn’t only rel­e­gated Share­Point but any tool, sys­tem, or process imple­mented in the enter­prise. While each of them could vary in degree they all exist in some form of a Share­Point implementation.

Polit­i­cal Barriers

Pol­i­tics are often the first road block encoun­tered when bring­ing a tool like Share­Point into the enter­prise. Some­one becomes sold on the plat­form usu­ally in IT but sold to exec­u­tives shortly after­ward, and then the back­lash begins. The first to bring argu­ment against the tech­nol­ogy are those who mon­i­tor and/or admin­is­ter legacy sys­tems. The BroadVision/Notes/etc team are not keen on hav­ing “their” appli­ca­tion moved into a new plat­form and poten­tially turned off. Share­Point becomes the hard­est to sell to these indi­vid­u­als. Instead of jump­ing on the new tech­nol­ogy train they fear the loss of their job and will fight it to the end.

Cul­tural Barriers

Usu­ally an enter­prise class tech­nol­ogy will make it pass the polit­i­cal bar­ri­ers, because some exec­u­tive (should have) been sold on it and pushes it through. The next group of peo­ple who become change averse are the end user or infor­ma­tion worker as Microsoft calls them. These are the peo­ple that are being told that the file share is not the way to store and col­lab­o­rate any­more. Often times frus­tra­tion ensues, and many peo­ple don’t care to see how much bet­ter Share­Point can poten­tially do their processes and fight it.

This is a stage where “quick wins” are impor­tant. Dur­ing this phase the Share­Point imple­men­ta­tion team take an exist­ing process that was cum­ber­some and error prone and do some­thing like auto­mate it with work­flow. They could also make the Sarbanes-Oxley com­pli­ance team by show­ing audit­ing. Here you try and bite off a lit­tle bit, show improve­ment, and these peo­ple who ben­e­fit become evan­ge­lists for the prod­uct. The most effec­tive sales per­son inside of a com­pany is another co-worker.

Tech­no­log­i­cal Barriers

The tech­nol­ogy itself can become a bar­rier if it is not planned wisely. Let’s say you being to roll out the tech­nol­ogy, and it’s painfully slow because you have SQL issues. The result­ing effect could turn many poten­tial users into quick haters. They then respond that “it’s too slow to use” and it becomes a hard stigma to over­come. It is impor­tant that the tech­no­log­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion is thor­oughly assessed and imple­mented before train­ing and imple­men­ta­tion begins, because when the imple­men­ta­tion starts it’s very impor­tant to set a prece­dent of reliability.

There is another tech­no­log­i­cal bar­rier that is actu­ally more cul­tural but very related. There will be peo­ple who instantly grab onto the tech­nol­ogy and want it to do every­thing for them. These projects often can creep into an imple­men­ta­tion and push a project off its time­line and side­line its over­all imple­men­ta­tion and adop­tion. It’s very impor­tant to have a project plan that is detailed in scope and peo­ple involved that want to see it saw through. Get­ting other ideas to use Share­Point is great, but not when it slows down an entire project.